You, who shattered my heart so completely that I never thought it would mend itself. You, whose voice I knew immediately even though it had been almost twenty years. You, who thinks only old women garden, are the one who came to my mind today as kneeled over my flower bed.

The sense of smell is so strong that it hurdled me back twenty years in a nanosecond. There I was again standing in front of my parents’ house on a humid summer night with the scents of mangroves and night jasmine and freshly mowed grass swirling together in my nose. And of course the butterflies were there just as they had been then –not in the air, but in my stomach and in my chest rapidly fluttering their wings.

You’re still hung up on the first sentence. I know you have not processed the rest. We’ll probably never agree. I hope some day you will understand.

Why is it that some memories won’t die? There is so much to remember from day to day. Oh the times my wallet was left at home…or my keys. A birthday missed, an errand not run this happens all the time. So why is there still room for those memories? They’re so vivid and equally bring such pleasure and such pain. Would I miss them if they did disappear? Maybe that’s why I haven’t let them go. Is it possible to let them go? Will they go? For good? Should I?

The radio was on in the car as we drove down the driveway, on our way to where I don’t remember anymore. I was in the front passenger seat unable to see over the dashboard of our maroon, two-door Ford LTD. I probably wasn’t wearing a seatbelt not because my mom didn’t care about me but because it was 1977.

My mom brought the car to a stop at the bottom of the driveway before she pulled out to make a left hand turn. That I remember.

The radio was tuned to an AM station, most likely AM1240 out of Waterbury, CT. I remember because we had to change our phone number not long before because it ended in those same four numbers–1-2-4-0. We were forever answering calls for song requests. After a weeks of apologizing to the callers and letting them know they had the wrong number, we just said we’d get the song right on and hang up the phone.

As she nudged the car forward to see beyond the hedges that lined our front lawn, the announcement came through the speakers.

“Elvis Presley is dead.”

Her foot went back on the brake.

“Elvis Pretzel is dead Mom?” I never could get his name right.

“Yeah,” she said, and we were both quiet for a moment–both of us processing the information in our own way. Me contemplating the finality of death; wrapping my seven year-old mind around such a horrific thought; worried that if he could die so too could the person I loved most in the world–the woman sitting next to me. And suddenly I was afraid. He couldn’t be dead! He couldn’t be gone!

“Isn’t there something someone can do?! Can’t they turn back the clock?” I asked. “No,” she said as she explained that if he was dead it was already too late. She was a nurse, and my mother, so I took her at her word letting the information sink in.

I wonder now what she was thinking when she heard the news. Elvis was the icon she grew up with. She had watched him on the Ed Sullivan Show with her family–my grandparents not understanding the draw. The cameras focused in on just his upper body. She watched over the years as he aged. She saw how he had become bloated. She saw too his comeback. But now he was gone.

Was part of her childhood gone too on that day?

Once again she inched the car forward and then turned left down the road. To where, I don’t remember.

It was just a moment in the car, at the end of the driveway, on a warm August day in 1977, but it has stayed with me for thirty years.